Friday, January 3, 2014

This post is a response to a question that I received on Twitter about restricting access to students' blog posts.

While I prefer to guide teachers in the direction of teaching their elementary school students not to reveal personally identifying information on classroom blogs, I also recognize that sometimes the only way a teacher will try blogging is if they can restrict access to just students and their parents. The directions below cover the same steps you can take to restrict access to Blogger and WordPress blog posts. Edublogs and Kidblog run on the WordPress software so the directions for restricting access to posts on those services are the same as for WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress blogs.

Restricting Access to Blogger Posts

If you cannot see the video, the screenshots below offer the same directions.

Step 1:

Step 2:

Step 3:

Restricting Access to WordPress Posts (and Kidblog and Edublogs)
(Click the images to view them full size).

Step 1: Create a post or a page in your blog editor. Before pressing publish click the "edit" link next to the visibility setting just above the "publish" button for your post or page.

Step 2: Select "private" or "password protected."

Follow the two steps pictured below to edit the visibility setting on existing pages or posts.

Moredays is an neat personal planner iPad app. Moredays offers all of the calendar and reminder options that we've come to expect from online personal planners. How Moredays tries to differentiate itself from the market is by offering the option to include images, videos, maps, and sketches as a part of your daily planner. I think it would be very handy when I plan a meeting with a new people to be able to include a pictures of those folks on that day in my calendar. Then when I look at my schedule I'm also practicing remembering those peoples' names before we ever meet in person. Watch the video below for a two minute overview of the all of the options Moredays offers.

Applications for Education
The option to include images and videos into a personal planner could be a great option for students. If students are in the habit of using a personal planner to keep track of test dates they might want to drop in a diagram or video on to view when they view their test dates. That way they can get in a quick review while reviewing their other important dates.

In yesterday's list of ten tools to help students keep track of tasks I included using Google Calendar events with reminders to keep track of long-term projects. A few people have emailed me asking how to create reminders in Google Calendar so I put together the following set of directions. (Click the images to view them in full size).

Step 1: Create your event and click "edit event."

Step 2: Scroll down to the "reminders" setting and choose the type of reminder that you want to receive.

Step 3: Add more reminders by clicking on "Add a reminder."

Step 4: After adding your reminders, click "save" at the top of screen.